Subway Lists and Other Writings from the iPhone Era: Including "The Pepsi Haggadah"

by Taylor Dinerman

The locals in New York make every effort to avoid looking up when they're on the subway.  In the past, newspapers, magazines and books served to shield eyes from the neighbors, but nowadays they have smartphones, mostly iPhones. I got my first iPhone in 2007 and kept it till 2012. Under the circumstances it served me pretty well, especially when I learned that the note-taking function could be used on the subway to write 'stuff'. At first I wrote notes for work, ideas for articles, memos for my colleagues in the space solar power business, reminders to myself. Then I found that I could make the time on the subway pass much more quickly by writing stuff that I thought was funny. From a historical perspective it may be interesting to find out how much time people spend looking at screens of one sort or another, versus how much time they spent doing so 70 years ago.  Today in some places it is quite possible that some people are spending more than half their total time, when awake, looking at screens of one sort or another. Soon there will be whole generations of people who will go to their graves having spent the majority of their waking hours looking at stuff on a screen.  Is this progress ?  Whatever it is, it should not be allowed to get in the way of a few laughs.   (from the Introduction)

52 pages, Paperback

Published April 23, 2013